First Principles Thinking
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First Principles Thinking
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Re: First Principles Thinking
#2Would recommend some examples and some investigation into the the trade offs and some false positives, coming from someone who's read like 10+ blogs on first principles thinking. The article really doesn't stand out from the competition at the moment. Has good potential though.
Re: First Principles Thinking
#3> Every first principle is a foundational proposition that stands alone (like an atom) and is pure. We cannot deduce it from any other proposition or assumption.
> When first principles form the foundations, the solution is sturdy. Elon Musk built both SpaceX (rockets) and Tesla (batteries) based on first principles. BuzzFeed's vitality is built on first principles.
I didn't like the article, and these passages illustrate why.
Re: First Principles Thinking
#4This is so incredibly bad. The second part of the main thesis is never justified, just asserted. The majority of this is a bunch of unjustified assertions barely connected where almost all actual connections are fallacious. Then some of this is just a hacked up ideolect that redefines things like chefs and cooks with no respect for the empirical world or how chefs, cooks or others actually use those words or how any of them actually do things.
> Reasoning by first principles removes the biases, assumptions and conventions.
First principles are assumptions. smh. It would be hard to write a more philosophically naive and generally unconvincing article on this topic.
Re: First Principles Thinking
#5When it comes to first principles thinking I've always liked this article from James Clear: https://jamesclear.com/first-principles.
Re: First Principles Thinking
#6I'm never thrilled with these types of essays, but it may be my own personal stuff.
I feel as if we are constantly looking for ways to be "better than you," and I always interpret these types of statements as people reinforcing that the way they do things is better than others, and, by extension, they, as humans, are better than others.
In my experience, we usually have some kind of balance. There's things that each of us are good at, and things that we are not. Sometimes, the things we're good at, are valuable to others, and we can make money, or achieve status. For example, software development, top-shelf athleticism, or strategic management thinking. Other things, maybe not as valuable (monetarily or status-wise), such as being an excellent parent, a great teacher, or a true Servant pastor.
I'm a great geek, but a really, really bad athlete. I'm not an especially good dancer, and I have not exactly left a trail of broken-hearted beautiful women in my life. I am not a captain of industry, and I have not done a TED talk.
So, no, I'm probably not actually "better than" anyone else, even if I do fit the criteria for "first principles thinking."
Re: First Principles Thinking
#7I'm never thrilled with these types of essays, but it may be my own personal stuff. I feel as if we are constantly looking for ways to be "better than you," and I always interpret these types of statements as people reinforcing that the way they do things is better than others, and, by extension, they, as humans, are better than others. In my experience, we usually have some kind of balance. There's things that each…
I would like to add to your insight that different situations also benefit from different approaches; and sometimes different approaches to the same situations produce interesting results.
Re: First Principles Thinking
#8This is a naive article with no critical thought from the author. It feels like the author is just rephrasing quotes from people like Elon Musk (who claims to use first principles thinking).
Progress in real life are mostly made by trial and error, and then the underlying theory or first principles are solidified later (eg jet engines, cooking recipes, penicillin).
The cases where things start from theory to some final outcome are incredibly rare and mostly concentrate in the field of theoretical physics.
People who think otherwise are usually people who never had to get their hands dirty in the nitty gritty of science and research (or cooking for that matter).
Re: First Principles Thinking
#9I don’t think chefs apply first principles.
For example, have you ever met a chef that was able to sketch out the 3-d structure of the various molecules and that used that information to guide their recipe?
No most chefs are using finely tuned heuristics about how different ingredients interact.
Re: First Principles Thinking
#10I'm never thrilled with these types of essays, but it may be my own personal stuff. I feel as if we are constantly looking for ways to be "better than you," and I always interpret these types of statements as people reinforcing that the way they do things is better than others, and, by extension, they, as humans, are better than others. In my experience, we usually have some kind of balance. There's things that each…
I would like to add to your insight that different situations also benefit from different approaches; and sometimes different approaches to the same situations produce interesting results.
I've always thought of "genius," as "looking at it differently," as opposed to "smarter."
From what history shows us, that's not a bad observation.